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State prosecutors said it took 22 months to make the case against Washington because they had to overcome the defendant’s Stand Your Ground claim — a controversial state law that critics say encourages vigilante justice.

“There was an initial presumption coming in that there was a Stand Your Ground issue,” said Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office spokesman Ed Griffith. “Subsequent investigation overcame the Stand Your Ground issue.”

Griffith did not say what additional evidence investigators found that led them to arrest Washington this week.

The confrontation that landed Washington in jail began in the early evening of Nov. 22, 2017. Police called to Washington’s South Miami Heights home at 22300 SW 116th Ave. found a woman lying dead in the grass, a bullet in her back. Witnesses quickly identified Washington as the shooter, police said, and told a story of nudity, violence and belligerence.

For several months, neighbors told police, Washington would linger in front of her bedroom window fully unclothed as children played in an open field with a clear view to her bedroom. Several times she was confronted and several times she brushed off the complaints, police said.

But this time, a woman and a friend who approached Washington spoke with her through the screen of her bedroom window. She became upset enough at Washington, that the woman sprayed dog repellent through the screen. The repellent missed, but Washington’s response, according to police and witnesses, was to produce a gun and fire back through the open window, striking the woman in the back, killing her.

The woman was about 20 feet from the window when she was struck. Police have not identified the victim.

After the shooting, police said Washington called police and told them what happened. In her arrest report, police describe the weapon Washington is accused of using as a .38-caliber revolver. To this day, the weapon has not been recovered.

“I’m not aware of the gun being found,” said Griffith.

A law-enforcement source said Washington claimed that a neighborhood woman who often visits her house took the gun, something the woman denied to police.

Police didn’t arrest Washington that day, even though she admitted to the shooting. The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner ruled the shooting a homicide.

Washington was well-known to police.

A few years earlier she served 120 days in Miami-Dade jail for attacking and hitting another woman with a mug. When she was arrested earlier this week, Washington was under house arrest because prosecutors said she refused to cooperate as the key witness in a 2016 murder case.

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